> > It is interesting that the Slavic aorist 2nd 3rd sg -tU
> > occurs only in the verbs that have ppp's in -t- (not -n-).
> > Actually, the term 'past participle passive' is a misnomer,
> > it should really be 'past participle absolutive' since
> > with intransitive verbs the sense is active. That means
> > that a sentence of a type <subject> <verb>-tV might be
> > understood in the same way as the common Slavic past
> > construction with an original -l participle, the
> > difference morphologically only being one of ablaut
> > grade of root and suffix.
> >
> Correct me if I'm wrong; I understand Kortlandt's version
> of Wackernagel like this: Narten presents owe their
> 3sg lengthened grade to a similar phenomenon to that of
> (endingless) 2,3sg aorist (lenghtened as compensation
> for loss of auslauting consonants), so some type of present
> would have been, analogously to aorist:
> e-grade root + *-om
> extended grade root + (*-s, lost, later restored)
> extended grade root + (*-t, lost, later restored)
> 3pl
> e-grade root + ént
>
> stewom
> ste:w
> ste:w
> -
> stewént
>
> ->
>
> stewom
> ste:ws
> ste:wt
> -
> stewént
>
> or what?
BTW, I reread the parts of Jens' 'Studien zur Morphophonemik
der indogermanischen Grundsprache' where he introduces his
R-infix which explains (part of) IE o-grade (I had gotten
the impression from somewhere that he derived that infix
ultimately from an R-prefix, but I can't find it in the text?).
Any way, two things he doesn't explain (as far I could tell)
1) the o-grade of perfect sg.
2) the semantics of that R-affix: what does/did it mean?
So I had an idea:
suppose that prefix was PPIE *a- (or *an- ?) and that it was
identical to the verbal augment PPIE *a, PIE *e-, and
that it changed the vowel of the root it was prefixed to
by means of some type of 'progressive umlaut' (the e-grade
of the augment in its classical sense would then be because
it was only joined to the verbal root at a late time, after
ablaut had run its course)?
In other words
perf
PPIE 3sg *a-man a -> *am-an a -> *am-on e -> PIE *mon-e
(cf double negation in Afrikaans 'nie <verb> ... nie')
PPIE 3pl *ma-man-an -> *me-mnen- etc
Note the two differnt syllabifications.
The perf. sg. can't always have had reduplication; two full
vowels in the stem is one too many. Instead, since I think
the meaning of that PPIE *a, PIE augment was something like
"then, there, voila, (at) once" or Russian 'vot!'. I think
it might have indicated singularity of the following noun or
verbal action, and only later was reduplication (which in its
origin indicates plurality) analogously extended to the sg.
This origin and semantics go also for occurrences of o-grade
in verbal (eg. causative-iterative) or nominal derivations.
I noted with pleasure that according to Jens' survey, verbal
stems ending in -R or -RT (R = m,n,l,r, X = stop) have o-grade
in causative-iterative derivates, this because
*a-CaN- -> *aC-aN- -> *aC-ãN- -> *CõN- -> *CoN-
makes phonological sense and
*a-Cal\- -> *aC-al\- *aC-ol\- -> *Col-
*a-Car.- -> *aC-ar.- *aC-or.- -> *Cor-
do too, if we assume PIE /l/ was "thick" and PIE /r/ was
retroflex, at least in syllable-final position.
Note that the ablaut vowel, PPIE /a/ in syllables of type
VC stays /a/ (as I took for granted in the above) in PIE
and not -> /e/,/o/ or zero as usual:
Hitt. 3pl apánzi, Latin ap-isco:
but a:C -> e:C
Hitt.3sg (from a:, because of the Narten-producing machanism
I sketched above) e:pzi, Latin coe:pi.
BTW, this loose a- prefix might be what we find in Schrijver's
substrate "language of bird names" to North European (IE and
non-IE) languages:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/25888
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/36405
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/42626
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/25872
assuming it was IE too.
Torsten